Home from Rugby Club after taking a nasty knock in a match, Connon finds his wife even more uncommunicative than ususal. After passing out on his bed for five hours, he comes downstairs to discover communication has been cut off forever - by a hole in the middle of her forehead. Down at the club, passions run high, on and off the field. This is a home game for Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel who knows all the players, male and female. But Sergent Peter Pascoe whose loyalties lie with another code has a few ideas of his own. This is the first appearance together on any field for Dalziel and Pascoe, and already we can feel that electricity of opposite but complementary skills which will take them into the topmost division.

A routine investigation into a five-year-old murder case leads Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe to the discovery of a series of related killings

From Yorkshire to the sleepy village of Thornton Lacey is only a morning's drive, but for Detective Sergeant Peter Pascoe, the distance will close off part of his life forever. Motoring down for a reunion with old friends, he arrives to find not a welcome but a grisly triple murder. Out of his jurisdiction, Pascoe is in an untenable one of his oldest friends is wanted for murder, his boss is ordering him back to Yorkshire, and his instincts are telling him that the local constabulary will never suspect that the crime's true motive lies not in the obvious places, but in the unexplored zones of passion within a twisted heart.

While Pascoe is away on his honeymoon, Dalziel takes a vacation that leaves him stranded at a bizarre country manor inhabited by murder and a most unusual group of suspects

“Reginald Hill blends civility and madness in a most agreeable way.”— New York Love, or at least pornography, was for sale at the arty Calliope Kinema Club on posh, proper Wilkinson Square. According to Yorkshire police superintendent Dalziel, it was all legal. Detective Peter Pascoe, however, sat uneasily in the dark. His dentist, who knew real broken teeth and blood when he saw them, insisted that the pretty actress wasn’t playing a part. But the action that would put Pascoe into the picture was homicide. The sudden death of the Calliope’s proprietor soon turned a sleazy sex flick into serious police business. And now Dalziel and Pascoe were looking into the all-too-human desire for pain, pleasure . . . and murder. “First-rate entertainment.”— The Sunday Times (London) “Mr. Hill refines his own talent to the highest levels of mystery fiction.”— Dallas Morning News “Reginald Hill has raised the classical British mystery to new heights.”— The New York Times Book Review

'Altogether an enjoyable performance, one of Mr Hill's best' Financial Times When Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet. The career of the Yorkshire Choker is underway. If Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he is downright angry when Sergeant Wield calls in a clairvoyant. Linguists, psychiatrists, mediums—it's all a load of nonsense as far as he is concerned, designed to make a fool of him. And meanwhile the Choker strikes again—and again!

Life was a bed of roses for Patrick Aldermann when Great Aunt Florence collapsed into her Madame Louis Laperrieres and he inherited Rosemont House with its splendid gardens. But when his boss, 'Danny' Dick Elgood, suggested to Peter Pascoe that Aldermann was a murderer - then retracted the accusation - the inspector was left with a thorny problem. By then the Police Cadet Singh, Mid-Yorkshire's first Asian copper, had dug up some very interesting information about Patrick's elegant wife, Daphne. Superintendent Dalziel, meanwhile, was attempting to relive the days of Empire with Singh as his tea-wallah.

Three old men die on a stormy November one by deliberate violence, one in a road accident and one by an unknown cause, Inspector Pascoe is called in to investigate the first death, but when the dying words of the acident victum suggest that a drunken Superintendent Dalziel had been behind the wheel, the integrity of the entire Mid-Yorkshire CID is called into question. Helped by the bright but wayward Detective-Constable Seymour, hindered by 'Maggie's Moron', the half-witted Constable Hector, Peter Pascoe enters the twilight and vulnerable world of the senior citizen - to discover that the beckoning darkness at the end of the tunnel holds few comforts.

'Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of crime fiction' Observer Geraldine Lomas' son went missing in Italy during World War Two, but the eccentric old lady never accepted his death. Now she is dead, leaving the Lomas beer fortune to be divided between an animal rights organization, a fascist front and a services benevolent fund. As disgruntled relatives gather by the graveside, the funeral is interrupted by a middle-aged man in an Italian suit, who falls to his knees crying, 'Mama!' Andy Dalziel is preoccupied with the illegal book one of his sergeants is running on who is to be appointed as the new Chief Constable. But when a dead Italian turns up in the police car park, Peter Pascoe and his bloated superior are plunged into an investigation that makes internal police politics look like child's play!

'Hill is an instinctive and complete novelist who is blessed with a spontaneous storytelling gift' Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday When young Tracey Pedley vanished in the woods around Burrthorpe, the close-knit community had their own ideas about what had happened, but Deputy Chief Constable Watmough has it down as the work of a child-killer who has since committed suicide - though others wondered about the last man to see her alive and his fatal plunge into the disused mine shaft. Returning to a town he left in anger, Colin Farr's homecoming is ready for trouble, and when a university course brings him into contact with Ellie Pascoe, trouble starts! Meanwhile Andy Daziel mutters imprecations on the sidelines, until a murder in Burrthorpe mine forces him to take action that brings him up against a hostile and frightened community!

One woman dead and one threatening to die set Yorkshire's police superintendent Dalziel and Inspector Pascoe on a chilling hunt for a killer and a potential suicide. A drunken Dalziel witnesses the murder that others insist is a tragic accident. Meanwhile the letters of an anonymous woman say she plans to kill herself in a spectacular way...unless Pascoe can find her first. Dalziel has been picked to play God in a local Mystery Play, but can he live up to his role by solving this puzzling psychological thriller...or unveiling the passions and perversions that lie hidden in the human heart?

In the year 2010 a French astronaut, one of an international space team from the Federated States of Europe, becomes the first man to be murdered on the moon. Retired Detective-Superintendent Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe are required to investigate. The author also wrote "Bones and Silence".

It was a crime of passion in onc of England's great houses, an open-and-shut case. But thirty years later, when the convicted nanny is freed, then spirited off to America before she can talk, Yorkshire's Superintendent Dalziel retums to the scene of the crime with Inspector Pascoe, determined to dig up the corpus delecti he investigated a generation before. Did the wrong aristocrat hang? Dalziel and Pascoe find decades-old clues that implicate a member of the royal family. When one of their prime leads is found dead, Dalziel is put "on leave"—and heads for New York to learn what the Nanny knows. Back home, Pascoe walks a thin line, quietly pursuing a case someone is trying to bury. Stiff upper lips do tell tale, but Dalziel and Pascoe discover on both sides of the Atlantic that it's hell on those trying to unearth the truth.

Reginald Hill's ironic humor, polished prose, and keen insight have placed him squarely alongside such great mystery writers as P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. In his latest novel his much-appreciated team of detectives, the incomparable Dalziel and Pascoe, find themselves in the pretty village of Enscombe, which is steadfastly trying—though somewhat in vain—to repel the advances of both tourists and developers. When a policeman is discovered missing, Pascoe is immediately worried, but Dalziel thinks he's overreacting... until the normally phlegmatic Sergeant Wield also shows signs of changing his first impressions of picture-perfect village life. Over two eventful days a new pattern emerges: one of lust and lying, family feuds and ancient injuries, frustrated desires and unbalanced minds. Finally, inevitably, everything comes to a bloody climax at the Squire's Reckoning, where the villagers gather each Lady Day to feast and pay old debts. Not even the three lawmen's presence can change the course of history... though one of them is to find the course of his own personal history changed forever.

Police inspector Peter Pascoe is looking for a place to bury his grandmum’s ashes, when he stumbles upon a startling family secret—an ancestor unjustly executed in wartime. So preoccupied is Pascoe that he hardly notices the uproar in his own department. Eight female animal rights protesters have unearthed human bones on the grounds of a drug company’s research headquarters. Yorkshire police superintendent Andrew Dalziel, a man of prodigious appetite, falls quickly for one of the activists: a generously endowed woman who calls herself Cap Marvell. While Dalziel begins to dally, the investigation into the unidentified corpse collides with the mystery of Pascoe’s disgraced great-grandfather and a high-stakes pharmaceutical research project. Suddenly the Yorkshire woods are giving up their darkest secrets: of animal instincts, human passions, and a conspiracy that has killed once, and will do so again...

'Hill is an instinctive and complete novelist who is blessed with a spontaneous storytelling gift' Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday If you've already met Dalziel and Pascoe, you're in for a treat. If you haven't yet had the pleasure, you're in for a revelation! Here in four stories we track their partnership from curtain-up to last act; from the mean streets of Mid-Yorkshire to the mountains of the moon. The Last National Service Man reveals the truth, hitherto buried in police files, of their momentous first encounter, while Pascoe's Ghost is a chilling tale taking us deep into Poe country. Dalziel's Ghost, meanwhile, finds the man who normally wouldn't be seen dead in a graveyard expressing a surprising interest in the 'other side'. And finally, One Small Step takes a giant leap forward to 2010 and the first murder on the moon.

Into thin air... Three little girls, one by one, had vanished from the farming village of Dendale. And Superintendent Andy Dalziel, a young detective in those days, never found their bodies—or the person who snatched them. Then the valley where Dendale stood was flooded to create a reservoir, and the town itself ceased to be . . . except in Dalziel's memory. Twelve years later, the threads of past and present are slowly winding into a chilling mosaic. A drought and dropping water table have brought Dendale's ruins into view. And a little girl has gone missing from a nearby village. Helped by Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, an older, fatter, and wiser Dalziel has a second chance to uncover the secrets of a drowned valley. And now the identity of a killer rests on what one child saw . . . and what another, now grown, fears with all her heart to remember ...

Pascoe’s wife becomes a moving target in this “delightfully quirky, literate, often explosively funny” mystery in the acclaimed series (Publishers Weekly). Reginald Hill “raised the classical British mystery to new heights” when he introduced pugnacious Yorkshire Det. Inspector Andrew Dalziel and his partner, the callow Sgt. Peter Pascoe (The New York Times Book Review). Their chafing differences in education, manners, technique, and temperament made them “the most remarkable duo in the annals of crime fiction” (Toronto Star). Adapted into a long-running hit show for the BBC, the Gold Dagger Award–winning series is now available as ebooks. Ellie Pascoe is a novelist, former campus radical, overprotective mother—and as an inspector’s wife, on high alert of suspicious behavior. When she thwarts an abduction plot, her husband, Peter, and his partner, Andrew Dalziel, assume a link to one of their past cases. An attack on Ellie’s best friend, Daphne, and a series of threatening letters from Ellie’s foiled kidnappers prove them wrong. Packed off to an isolated seaside safe place, Ellie, Daphne, and their bodyguard, DC Shirley Novello, aren’t about to lie in wait for the culprits’ next move. They’re on the offensive. No matter how calculated their plot of retaliation is, they have no idea just how desperately someone wants Ellie out of the picture. Or how insanely epic the reasons are. Arms and the Women is the 19th book in the Dalziel and Pascoe Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Yorkshire investigators Dalziel and Pascoe find themselves embroiled in a deadly duel of wits against a killer known only as the Wordman - a brilliant sociopath who leaves literary clues and dead bodies in his wake .

Death's Jest-Book (Dalziel & Pascoe Novel)

A Dalziel and Pascoe mystery

There was no sign of life. But not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and forever shall be, world without end, amen. Everybody knew that. Therein lay half his power. Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on forever. Caught in the blast of a huge explosion, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel lies on a hospital bed, with only a life support system and his indomitable will between him and the Great Beyond. Meanwhile, his colleague, Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, is determined to find those responsible. Ignoring his own injuries, the advice of his friends, and the pleas of his wife, Pascoe follows a winding trail to the Templars, a mysterious group that believes the only way to fight terrorism is through terror. Where the arm of the law cannot reach, their work begins. Soon Pascoe comes to suspect that they may have support and sympathy in high places, from men ready to accept the death of a policeman or of any other innocent bystander as regrettable but unavoidable collateral damage. From the streets of Manchester to the Yorkshire countryside, Pascoe searches for the truth. And above it all, like a huge zeppelin threatening to break from its moorings, hovers the disembodied spirit of Andy Dalziel.

“Reginald Hill is quite simply one of the best at work today.” — Boston Globe There is no end to the praise mystery writer Reginald Hill has already earned for his British police procedurals featuring Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe and Detective Superintendent “Fat Andy” Dalziel. Having recently bested Harlan Coben, Val McDermid, Michael Connelly, and James Patterson for the Crime Writers Association’s Mystery and Thriller People’s Choice Dagger, the master returns with The Price of Butcher’s Meat—as a recuperating Andy Dalziel (following his close brush with mortality in Death Comes for the Fat Man ) gets involved in the murderous politics of a not-so-peaceful seaside community. The Price of Butcher’s Meat is more “great stuff from one of the greats, and a true must for fans of British crime” ( Denver Rocky Mountain News ).

It starts with a phone call to Superintendent Dalziel from an old friend asking for help. But where it ends is a very different story. Gina Wolfe has come to mid Yorkshire in search of her missing husband, believed dead. Her fiancé, Commander Mick Purdy of the Met, thinks Dalziel should be able to take care of the job. What none of them realize is how events set in motion decades ago will come to a violent head on this otherwise ordinary summer's day. A Welsh tabloid journalist senses the story he's been chasing for years may have finally landed in his lap. A Tory MP's secretary suspects her boss' father has an unsavory history that could taint his son's prime ministerial ambitions. The ruthless entrepreneur in question sends two henchmen out to make sure the past stays in the past. And the lethal pair dispatched have some awkward secrets of their own. Four stories, two mismatched detectives trying to figure it all out, and twenty-four hours in which to do it: Dalziel and Pascoe are about to learn the hard way just how much difference a day makes.